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-# Michelle Hadje/Sasha --- 2151
+# Ioan Bălan --- 2326
 
-In the endless, rolling field of dandelions, five people gathered.
+"We're nearing the point of this project where we're considering pulling together all of our notes. We have quite a bit already, certainly enough for an overview, and if we decide to do a second volume as a deeper dive, we can consider that later." Ioan smiled to the skunk across the table from em, one ey had so many reasons to fear. "So this interview is mostly meant to wrap everything up, fill in a few gaps here and there. Does that sound alright?"
 
-Two of them were shaped like a woman. Short. Dark, curly hair. Round of cheek and soft of eye.
+"Of course," True Name said, smiling. "I have read over the summary that you sent me, and it looks fairly complete, but I will answer any question you ask."
 
-Two of them were shaped like skunks. Thick, soft fur. Tails as long as their bodies, as wide as their torsos.
+Ioan collected eir thoughts for a moment, testing eir pen's nib against the paper. "Right. Okay. The first thing I'd like to ask is that, well, you've given us a good bit of information about your why, how, and when for many of the things that you did around Secession and Launch. I think we've got an idea of what, too, but it seems almost too big to grasp at a glance, so I'd like to know who all was involved.
 
-The two types were alike in so many ways. The softness evident between the two disparate species was the same softness. The roundness to the cheeks, despite the fur, was the same roundness. The eyes bore the same expressive empathy.
+"I am assuming you mean in more detail than just us and the Jonas clade, yes?" She tilted her head when Ioan nodded, apparently considering the best way to answer. "I, like Jonas Prime did for his clade, acted as the point of contact for the Ode clade in this endeavor. However, Jonas's methods tended toward that of a hydra: he coordinated with all of his instances working on various aspects only as much as was required to keep them from stepping on each other's toes.
 
-And before them sat one who was not like any of the others, and yet was exactly like all of them. When she focused, she was able to look like skunk or like human, and her eyes were able to share in some of that softness, but when she lost focus, waves of both crashed against her in a violent tempest, splashing fur up over cheeks, or skin down over paws.
+"I was much more akin to the central nervous system for the Odists. The Bălan clade has interviewed Why Ask Questions, End Waking, and May Then My Name, but the entirety of my stanza was working for me at one point or another--"
 
-"I am sorry," she said through a dry throat, then laughed. "I am having a bad day."
+"May is in your stanza," Ioan said, frowning.
 
-Among the four in front of her, there were two expressions. The two sitting at the ends of the row looked as though they were struggling to keep from crying, and two in the middle frowned, as though tamping down some emotion that wavered between fear and disappointment.
+True Name winked, then continued, "But there were several others from other stanzas, as well. Praiseworthy and Qoheleth, yes, but many of the first lines and several of their initial forks helped out quite a bit. Even Hammered Silver, in her own way, helped. She kept Michelle company, helped her throughout the long years, They grew quite close, and through her, I was able to accomplish what I required from Michelle."
 
-"Anyway," Michelle/Sasha said. "I guess I just wanted to get a few of us together to confirm some thoughts that I have been having of late."
+"Is that the difference between the liberal and conservative elements of the clade? The ones who were under your employ and aligned to it, and those who weren't?"
 
-"Is this about the Council?" the woman sitting on the inside, To Pray For The End Of Endings, asked.
+The skunk laughed openly. "They are silly names, are they not? There are hardly categories so neat, Ioan. We cannot even make a spectrum, can we? All of us had our different jobs, as mentioned. Praiseworthy provided her services as propagandist between productions. Qoheleth rewrote the memories of the System itself, and though he suffered for it, he was good at his job. Hammered Silver sat with Michelle, Why Ask Questions and Answers Will Not Help managed the phys- and sys-side politics, and End Waking kept his fingers in the finances. That is hardly a spectrum from liberal to conservative, is it?"
 
-"Well, yes and no. My thoughts on the council were the root of it. It is just...did I fuck up?"
+Ioan shrugged, waited for her to continue.
 
-At this, the skunk sitting on the end, May Then My Name Die With Me, burst into tears.
+"As you will," she said, grinning. "If there is to be a divide between liberals and conservatives, then, it must be in the scale of their thoughts, of their actions. Those who you and Dear and, who knows, perhaps even May Then My Name call conservatives think on the scale of centuries. Their thoughts are bound up at the level of species, their actions work on a global scale. More than a global scale, for the System is not on the globe, and the LVs are well on their way out of the solar system now, are they not?"
 
-"Fuck up how?" To Pray asked.
+"And the liberals think too small?" Ey shook eir head, adding, "I guess that's a value judgement. The liberals think smaller? Like on the individual scale?"
 
-Michelle/Sasha sighed, shrugged, and hugged her knees to her chest, resting her chin/snout on them. "I did not think things through very well when I created the clade. I thought that it might give me a vacation. A chance to figure out what was wrong, maybe fork my way out of this...well, this." She gestured at herself, smiling tiredly. "But now I feel like I have fucked up. Half of the clade dissolved the Council and the other half has rejected the first and spun off to do its own thing. If I had taken a week off and figured out that I could fork myself into one shape or the other and just done that, perhaps there would still be a Council."
+"Oh, you had it right the first time. The liberals think too small. They are completely welcome to, of course. Take Dear and Serene, for instance. It is in no way wrong for them to think about the work that they do. They consider the ways in which sims and instances affect those that interact with them, and then they play on those effects like a finely tuned instrument. It speaks to a level of...how should I put this? It bespeaks a showmanship that I --- that Michelle and the owner of the Name, for that matter --- could not hope to achieve. They are the consummate performers.
 
-The skunk beside To Pray, If I Am To Bathe In Dreams, shrugged. "You may have fucked up, yes, but there is no going back. What was the phrase? There is no going and there is no back? The Council is dissolved and nothing really changed. Jonas is doing Jonas things. Odists are doing Odist things, whatever those are. This is where you are. I mean this as an earnest question, but would you be able to choose between Michelle and Sasha?"
+"But what can they do with that? What use do they believe they are to the System? I do not mean that in a simple utilitarian sense, or at least not only in that sense, but I wonder if they, as artists, consider the end goals of their work. Do not let Dear tell you otherwise, it is an artist, and a very fine one, but all its art accomplishes is all any art accomplishes. It is transgressive without being subversive. It does not move the population to greater goals."
 
-"No, I do not think I could," she sighed. She just wished she could be Sasha for a little bit, just so that she could get the comfort of being petted by Memory Is A Mirror Of Hammered Silver/she just wished she could be Michelle for a little bit so that May Then My Name Die With Me could brush her hair. "And I think that is part of the problem, anyway. I think that if I were to fork, I would be whatever I was when I did so, and I think that goes beyond just species."
+"Isn't that okay though? For an artist, I mean. Art doesn't always have to inspire our societies to better themselves or our societies, does it?"
 
-To Pray grinned, "I suppose so. You could have wound up like True Name or Life Breeds Life and taken over the world."
+"Of course not," True Name said, smiling. "Art can be all of those things and still be fine. It can be an endeavor that adds to the world around it, even if it does not push it to realize greater capabilities. That is the opposing view to the conservatives. The names do not fit, do you see? The conservative elements of the Ode clade are those who steer and guide and lead and always hunt for greater potential. The liberal elements of the Ode clade are the artists dropped within, the storytellers, the landscape artists, the lovers and dancers and actors. The conservatives forge, the liberals hone. Both of us live wholly in the work that we have before us, and both of us love what we do."
 
-May Then My Name smiled shakily. "Taking over the world is not so bad."
+Ioan's hand brushed across eir page in an even cadence as she spoke, and when ey reached the end of the line, ey paused, formulating eir next question. "Where did all of this come from?"
 
-"It definitely fucking is, May," In Dreams said. "But I stand by what I said. You did what you did and that is an immutable fact. You cannot un-fork, Michelle. You cannot become what you were then, Sasha, you can only become what you will be."
+"Can you expand on that?"
 
-"I do not think that you fucked up, dear." Hammered silver plucked a dandelion and spun it between her fingers. "You may *be* fucked up, if you somehow contained what it takes to be both May Then My Name *and* True Name within you, but even that is not your fault."
+"This," ey said, waving eir hand at True Name, at the page. "To hear tell from the other Odists, this work began essentially as soon as you were forked off from Michelle. Each of you seemed to individuate immediately, whereas it took Codrin far longer to do so. Years, even. Even after the name change, after ey moved in with Dear and its partner, ey still could have just as easily been a Ioan. From the way it sounds, you ceased being Michelle as soon as you were instantiated. Where did that come from?"
 
-"The fuck-up, then would be the fact that I did not acknowledge that."
+The skunk looked thoughtful for a moment, then closed her eyes. The look of concentration on her face grew, and then, for a few short seconds, she became like Michelle. Ey saw, for the first time in years, that wavering between Michelle and Sasha, those waves of skunk/human/skunk/human/skunk that washed over her form, and always on her face, that look of exhaustion, of the concentration needed to hold it together.
 
-In Dreams pulled up a whole handful of grass and flowers and threw it at her, grinning. "Do not mope. It does not become you."
+And as True Name focused on recalling that bit of Michelle that lingered from the past, she forked off copy after copy of herself, each instance lasting only a fraction of a second, but throughout the display, Ioan saw the ways in which they differed. First, a Michelle would flick into existence, and then a Sasha. First, a skunk that looked happy, then a human that looked to be in agony. Always in flux, always tied to whatever it was that True Name must have been experiencing at that point.
 
-Sasha/Michelle laughed, shrugged, and tried to tuck one of the flowers behind her ear, but as soon as a shift of form rolled across her face, it fell to the ground.
+And then, it was over.
 
-She wished that she could be just one thing for a little while, but seeing the outcome of a scattered mind creating copy after copy of herself, she knew that there was no solution that did not run the risk of becoming what she did not want to be.
+The skunk puffed out a pent-up breath, laughing and fanning her face with a paw. "That was way fucking harder than I remember it being. I have not tried that trick in decades."
 
-She wished that she could be just one thing so that she could be touched. The shifting form made any touch unnerving, made her feel disgusting. She wished that for herself, and for May Then My Name, who looked as though she was using every ounce of willpower she had to keep from going in for a hug.
+Ioan blinked, frowned. "You differ because of when it was that Michelle forked?"
 
-*Being like her would not be so bad,* Michelle/Sasha thought. *But even then, that is not all of me.*
+"That is part of it," True Name said, catching her breath. "I read your notes, do you remember what it was that Douglas said about having a fever?"
 
-They sat in silence for a while, then, this five-pack of her, and, regardless of what they thought about, she thought about empathy and mirrors of hammered silver and the end of memories, there, beneath the roots.
+Ey prowled through the exo ey had devoted to this project, rifling through files of memories, then recited, "I had a very high fever, and when it was at its worst, I felt as though I was being offered a chance to peek behind a curtain, or at least see the shadows moving around backstage beneath the hem of it."
 
-*I think I died, back then,* Sasha thought/"I think I died back then," Michelle said.
+"Do you imagine that what Michelle was feeling at any time, or at least on any particularly bad day, was any different?" Her expression darkened. "When you are lost, when you are locked in your mirrored cage, any cord that tied a thought to reality or your concept of self is slowly severed. Michelle was lucky. She was in there for sixteen hours, she was told, and she still came out like this. Many of her thoughts remained tethered, enough for her to continue to live and exist in the world for a little while, but the longer she lived, the more of those frayed cords began to break, and she was not just, as Douglas put it, "granted a glimpse of some thinner reality", but she found herself stuck there.
 
-To Pray frowned. "What do you mean?"
+"When she forked, wherever she was, that was what we became. The state of her mind in flux, her body in flux, became the state that led to us. Perhaps I was pinned to a memory, however fleeting, of the political systems that led to her getting lost. Perhaps Praiseworthy was pinned to memories of playing a role in a play."
 
-"I think I just gave everything I had to them. To you, I guess. "Two weeks," I remember thinking. "The first lines can take my place for two weeks, and then I will be back on the council, and they can do their own thing." But I think that I died. There was no returning to the council, because there was no more Sasha or Michelle."
+Ioan scribbled furiously to keep up, as the skunk's language flowed more easily and became more flowery.
 
-"And what is the fallout of being a dead woman walking?"
+"But this is just speculation, Mx. Bălan. We do not know why we differ so much, but we do, and that is the best guess we have. The evidence you have just seen is all we have to back it up, but you have seen what was borne from it. All of the stanzas have their role, and mine just happens to be that of politics. We influence people. It is just what we do."
 
-"I do not know. I think that it means that I have stopped. I do not know if there is a path forward for me that involves me being anything other than what I am now. I died because with that act I cannot move on from where I am."
+"Which is why your stanza was able to dive so easily into their associated tasks. They had your memories, of course, but they also had that same drive."
 
-Hammered Silver averted her eyes. "I am not comfortable with that language."
+She beamed at em. "Precisely. I will not enumerate them all, but you can, if you like, think of them as a microcosm of that conservative-liberal spectrum, with me at the conservative end, working on the scale of centuries and populations, and your May Then My Name at the other, liberal end."
 
-Michelle/Sasha shrugged helplessly. "I am sorry. Like I said, I am having a bad day."
+"What did May do? What was her task?"
 
-"Sasha," May Then My Name said. "Why did you call us here? I do not think it is because you feel like you fucked up or like you died. Why are we here?"
+"That is for her to tell."
 
-"I guess I just wanted to see proof that at least some of the clade are good people. I know Hammered Silver is. She comes by at least once a day. I know you two are--" She nodded at To Pray and In Dreams. "--because you have kept me up to date on the others. And I do not think May could swat a fly without feeling bad about it."
+"No, True Name. You're here, it's your story. You promised me that you'd expand on the question of who, and I want you to live up to that promise now." Ey was surprised at the anger in eir own voice. There was a tightness in eir chest, an anxiety, an emotion somewhere between protectiveness and betrayal, stemming from the answer that hovered over the table, there in eir house. Eir and May's house, now. May, who had left on some drummed up errand as soon as True Name had arrived, a look of what ey could only describe as torment on her face. Ey *knew* ey should ask her, rather than True Name, and yet... "What did May do?"
 
-The skunk stuck her tongue out, but did not disagree.
+She stood from her chair and walked around the corner of the table to where ey remained stubbornly seated. "If you do not wish to be unhappy with the answers to difficult questions, Ioan," she said, tousling eir hair. "Then you do not need to ask them."
 
-"Reassurance," Hammered Silver muttered. "Validation, maybe? Proof that you are not just the things that you hate about yourself?"
-
-Sasha/Michelle nodded.
-
-"Where do you think they came from, then? Where did we come from?"
-
-Michelle/Sasha laughed. "I have no idea. Maybe you are the part of me that always wanted to be a mother. Maybe True Name is that bit of myself that always fears that asking for what I want is manipulation, or the mirror image of that. I really do not know."
-
-"It is okay to have fears," Hammered Silver said gently. "Like, it is legal. You will not get arrested for being afraid."
-
-They all grinned.
-
-"But," she continued. "Do not always dwell in them. Resent True Name and Life Breeds Life for a little while, then go back to remembering that you always wanted to be a mom and that you still love acting even after you became a director and that you really, really fucking love dandelions."
-
-"Seriously," In Dreams said. "To an almost unhealthy level. This is an intervention, Michelle. You need to chill with the dandelions."
-
-As the cloud of rumination began to lift, and as she laughed, she began to settle down into Michelle. Just Michelle. Just herself. "They cannot be that bad. They just got stuck in my head, and now I cannot get them out."
-
-"Snorting pollen off the back of your hand in the back parking lot," To Pray said, picking up on the mood. "I am honestly ashamed of you."
-
-"My name is May Then My Name Die With me," the skunk said, clambering to her feet. "And I am a dandelion-aholic."
-
-"Hi, May Then My Name," the others sing-songed.
-
-And then she was Michelle. At least for a little while, she was just Michelle, and May Then My Name could brush her hair and they could talk about something else, and she could allow the thought that perhaps even the dead can be happy.
+She smiled down to em. In that smile was a plastic kindness, and in that kindness was a loathing ey could not fathom. And then she quit.